ArsTechnica reports that Intel's Larrabee graphics chip technology has been delayed indefinitely:
Specifically, Larrabee v1 is so delayed that, at the time it eventually launches, it just won't be competitive as a discrete graphics part, so Intel plans to wring some value out of it by putting it out as a test-bed for doing multicore graphics and supercomputing development. Intel will eventually put out a GPU, but may not be the one we've been calling "Larrabee" for the past few years.
Larrabee had been the codename for a new graphics card technology that would compete head to head with NVidia and ATI. Larrabee had a unique hybrid design that was said to scale incredibly well with multiple cores. Apple's Snow Leopard was well poised to take advantage of this multi-core design and Apple had been rumored to be planning on adopting the chip upon its release:
And I've heard from a source that I trust that Apple will use Larrabee; this makes sense, because Larrabee, as a many-core x86 multiprocessor, can be exploited directly by GrandCentral's cooperative multitasking capabilities.
Obviously, with this development, we're not going to be seeing this technology in Macs anytime soon. In fact, Intel is not even planning on announcing details about their followup graphics product until 2010.
